Today Americans are doing everything they can to cut their spending and to save more. Considering the uncertainty of the times, no one can blame them. As a general rule, however, consumer spending accounts for approximately 70% of U.S. economic activity. So this reaction causes great concern from the macroeconomic overview. Yet why should ordinary Americans assume the brunt of the current economic collapse that in essence was caused by the banking and financial institutions? The US taxpayers have already taken on a 700 billion dollar government obligation. This condition is fundamentally different than the period following the 9/11 disasters. At that time as we faced a national shock followed by a potential major recession, George Bush cheerily exhorted the public to “just go shopping.” Now we face a liquidity trap that, according to Wikipedia, means “a situation in monetary economics in which a country's nominal interest rate has been lowered nearly or equal to zero to avoid a recession, but the liquidity in the market created by these low interest rates does not stimulate the economy.” In our monetary system, this means the Federal Reserve can stimulate the economy only by creating and injecting liquidity into the economy through banks as intermediaries. In our current circumstance, however, banks are unwilling to lend, so “the newly created liquidity is trapped behind unwilling lenders.”

 We Americans live in perilous times, the lies we’ve been exposed to multitudinous. Yet throughout this opening to the 21^st Century, the public has shown a principled commitment to the ideals of fairness and self-enlightenment despite a series of constitutional blowups and divergences. The ability to resist overt manipulation and protest economic scams has remained strong and consistent since the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. But people are starting to lose jobs, income and self-confidence.
 Recently, our in-bred skepticism and spirit of revolt has been severely tested through ongoing assaults of sophisticated public relation campaigns and consistent use of messaging techniques that convey simple and appealing claims for otherwise dubious intentions. Rather than the creation of millions of jobs, as once had been asserted, the hard reality of today’s workplace consists of the wholesale destruction of millions and millions of jobs. And the corporate welfare that results in millions of more people looking for work foreshadows the collapse of any underlying web of security or infrastructure and culminates in the ultimate breakdown of the social network.
 In the final analysis, we might ask what has caused this almost total failure in the economy? Because our system places the profit motive so highly above everything else and the competition among “pure” capitalists to be the richest person is so fierce, the market can no longer sustain the huge disparity in wealth between the top 1-5% of the population and the remaining 95-99%. It is also the excessive accumulation of capital at the top that drives particularly wealthy individuals and certain influential families to believe that, by rights, our government seats belong to them.

 We must see that gratuitous power relationships and corporate welfare benefits almost always involve political profiteering and overall economic sabotage. We must demand new politicians, who support broad social systems that are universal, innovative, open, affordable, transparent and accountable to the public.

 With deficits steadily increasing to parallel the growing rate of unemployment and yet another senate vote for a bailout that allows the banking industry to grab still more of our taxpayer money, I propose we look more closely at our social values and the root causes of this economic condition.
 Bankers appropriate substantial profits gained from the workers with little or no interest in distributing anything in return to working people as a reward for their industry. When the social benefits such as a single-payer national health plan receive absolutely no consideration in favor of serving the interests of the wealthy, we have seemingly forgotten or consented to forgo basic services that should be considered as constitutional rights.
 While almost universally true that everyone wants services, it's also true that certain people want someone else to pay.
 The rich don't need that much money and are less likely to spend it as to increase their savings. So unless the new administration reverses its tax policy to restore tax rates to the level prevailing in 2000, we are headed in exactly the wrong direction and soon that will be overwhelming.

Unless one happens to grow up in an extremely stratified country such as Saudi Arabia or Kuwait where the Saudis and Kuwaitis barely do any work and everyone else is essentially a lowly worker, or a person is involved in a criminal enterprise, generally people throughout the world tend to think a great deal about jobs, income and benefits (or lack thereof). At around age twelve, I was first asked to consider what kind of career I wanted to pursue, while some, of course, just start and continue to work wherever they can make money. I never even thought much about economics until I entered college when it took on a new dimension rather quickly.
Considering economics more closely from the perspective of growing up in the United States, I began to question why some people have so much money they do not have any real economic concerns while others have almost nothing. By comparison, in today’s reality this picture has worsened as we now have an economy with a significant increase in the gap between the haves and have not. This direction is antithetical to individual freedom, truth and the interests of the American people, though as Ralph Nader has pointed out, “most citizens align themselves with the haves, so they see class warfare as coming against them.''
The Bush administration seemed to value two things only: money and power in an elitist, oligarchical system. They and many of the outrageously wealthy senators do not care what ordinary Americans feel or think. I expect them to continue lying all the way to the day of Obama’s inauguration and beyond. http://www.pubrecord.org/nationworld/601-bushs-embellishes-record-on-veterans-issues.html.Unless a dramatically fresh approach takes place in Washington, D.C., however, a new administration will not represent a notable change to fundamental economic inequality. Yet a point of deterioration surely exists in this distribution of income problem in the U.S. where the negative consequences will lead to a complete destabilization of our democratic form of government. A depression, long periods of stagnation, political upheavals, and social conflict will cost the rich far more than higher taxes with many today experiencing a diminishment of their constitutional rights.

This blog was initiated to focus on the concern of jobs and the economy during the time of the congressionally approved $750 billion bailout. Since then, it seems we have all been affected by the downturn in the economy. Senator Barbara Boxer concluded a recent email by stating: "My top priority - in fact, my only priority right now - is to stabilize the housing market, create new, good-paying jobs, and get our economy back on track. Too many Californians are suffering to accept delay."

 The numbers that have evolved from Treasury and Banking during this period of time are dizzying, especially when we know that we are being fleeced by spending trillions on bank and business bailouts while individuals are becoming bankrupt and the mega-rich in our capitalist system businesses are being rewarded. This trend of tax giveaways to Wall Street speculators, corporate executives and self-interested politicians must be reversed.

 By raising our voices, we can turn our government's direction on its head so that people's interests may be placed over the greed of those individuals taking advantage of the capitalist system. If that happened, then our labor, land, resource management and treasury would belong more to the community as a whole. This approach would seem to be the best long-term solution in order to right the wrongs that are inherent in the capitalist system.

 Many democratic countries such as France, Germany, Sweden and Japan understand the advantages of mutual governance of corporations partially owned and managed by the government. They develop economic planning to protect and promote the interests of the people, not the rich and powerful. We must make a major investment to put millions of Americans to work, rebuild our country and regain control of our rights and interests in several key areas.